Warming up

Before we get started, read this snippet from Watership Down, and then jot down your answers to the questions below.

(You don't have to write an essay, just a few notes to pin your thoughts.)

To rabbits, everything unknown is dangerous. The first reaction is to startle, the second to bolt. Again and again they startled, until they were close to exhaustion. But what did these sounds mean and where, in this wilderness, could they bolt to? The rabbits crept closer together. Their progress grew slower. Before long they lost the course of the brook, slipping across the moonlit patches as fugitives and halting in the bushes with raised ears and staring eyes. The moon was low now and the light, wherever it slanted through the trees, seemed thicker, older and more yellow.

Watership Down(1972)

What is happening in this snippet?

How do the rabbits feel?

What is making them feel that way?

What do they do in response to those feelings? (Go back and look if you need to!)

Does the passage ever explicitly tell you how the rabbits feel? Does the snippet use the same words that you used above? How do you know the rabbits feel the way you think they feel? (Go back and look!)

How do you feel yourself when you read this snippet?

Here are some things you might have noticed:

This is a scene about rabbits travelling out in the open.
They're scared.
They're scared because when they are out in the open they are vulnerable to predators.
Because they are scared, they travel close together, stop frequently, and are always listening and looking around.
But the snippet doesn't actually say they feel scared: it tells us what they do, it shows us what they are looking at and responding to, it even tells us what they think.
We figure out for ourselves that the rabbits are scared.
Different readers will have different feelings reading this snippet.
You probably don't feel scared yourself, but you might be interested because fear and danger get your attention.
You can also likely empathise with the rabbits—you can imagine what it would be like to be them in this situation, and their actions would make sense to you.

The questions about this snippet touch on the key themes of our three lessons about emotion in narrative:

What do emotions mean?
What causes them?
How do they influence our actions?
How do we represent them in story?
How do stories evoke emotion in the reader?

That's a lot to explore, so let's get started with Lesson 1.

Emotion 1: Emotional cause and effect